Work Text:
Sasappis drops the question on a random Monday. Sam is sipping on her coffee, doing some research for an article when he enters the office and asks if she has a second for a quick question. She sets her mug to the side and tilts her laptop screen down; a ghost wanting to ask a ‘quick’ question could range from anywhere to ‘what’s the capital of Idaho’ to ‘what’s evolution’. But Sam would always make time for them nevertheless.
“What’s up?” She asks.
“I was just curious,” Sasappis starts innocently. “What’s Archive of Our Own?”
Sam chokes on air. Sasappis eyes go wide as she coughs, and he half-turns towards the door in case he has to run and grab Trevor to text Jay that Sam is choking. But after a moment she manages to recover, and clears her throat.
“Where - where did you hear about that?” She asks.
“You had it up on your computer the other day.” Sasappis says tilting his head, looking slightly confused.
Sam curses under her breath. She had hoped that she had switched tabs quick enough that none of them had seen it, but apparently not. She really had no idea what the ghosts would think about… all of that.
“Archive is… a site where people can publish stories.” Sam says slowly.
“Oh, so it's like a publishing house.” Sasappis nods.
“No, not quite.” She interjects. “It’s not professional or anything. Anyone can publish anything on there. And anyone can read anything. Well, you there are some fics that you can only see if you have an account, but the general idea of it is to make writing and reading more accessible to the average person.”
“Oh.” Sasappis says, eyes wide. “That’s so cool. Can I see?”
“Uh….” Sam panics, trying to come up with a reason to not show the ancient Lenape storyteller The Fanfiction Website™. “Not all of the works are…good. Like when it comes to AO3 you can get a really mixed bag - there are no official editors either, usually at least, so there spelling and grammar, like, everywhere.”
Sasappis squints at her. “Why are you being weird?”
“I’m always weird.” Sam shoots back.
He crosses his arms and glares at her. “If you don’t tell me, I’m gonna go get Trevor to go on the laptop and find out. Or we could just keep this between us.”
Sam sighs. The last thing she wants is any of the others to know about this. Maybe if she can just keep it between her and Sass…
She opens the laptop carefully. “The thing is… that most of the stories on here… are fanfiction.”
“Sam, I don’t know what the word means.” Sasappis deadpans.
“It’s like, uh… you know how there are professional writers, right? Who make books and movies and stuff?” Sasappis nods. “Well sometimes, other people, who are not affiliated with those writers, have more ideas about how a story could go, or a missing scene, or a completely different story entirely just with characters from a movie or book and they decide to just… write it.”
Sam says, stumbling over her explanation. Sasappis looks off into the distance.
“Okay… and…?” He gestures.
Sam frowns. “And what?”
“And why are you being so weird about it?”
“You don’t think it’s weird?” Sam asks. “Or offensive or anything?”
“No?” Sasappis shakes his head. “When I told stories, I always liked to put my own spin on things; this kinda sounds like that just with some more liberties. That’s how stories grow, by passing them around and letting people explore them in their own way.”
Sam smiles and straightens up a little. It feels weirdly validating to have a professional storyteller say than fanfic isn’t weird or perverted or anything. She pulls up the page.
“Okay, here, wanna see?”
Sasappis grins and moves around the desk to look over her shoulder. Yeah; her article can wait. She shows him the main page and then asks if there are any shows or books that he wants to see stories of.
“Gravity Falls?” He asks and Sam grins, quickly navigating to the page in question. She appreciates the way his eyes light up when he sees it.
She splits her screen for a bit, working on her article while Sasappis scrolls through a treasure trove of stories, each one different and unique from the last. Sometimes he’ll ask her to exit out of one within the first sentence, others he’ll read to the end, grinning the whole time. Sam shows him how to filter tags, and the process of leaving kudos and comments; as a courteous reader always does. Even with her attention split she does her best to keep an eye on the stories he chooses, trying to make sure he doesn’t pick anything particularly gory. Luckily, he picks up on reading warnings quickly and steers clear of any of the more violent stories.
She does notice that he prefers the found family trope, which makes her smile a bit. It’s one of her favourites too.
After Sam is done with her article and they have to go and join the others she swears Sass to secrecy about the whole fanfic thing. He may be cool with it, but she’s a little worried about how the others may react. (The whole thing might be baseless, but there’s a part of her that’s still that little girl who didn’t know why others people were making fun of her for writing a sequel to her favourite book.) He doesn’t look like he understands but agrees nevertheless.
Later he comes back and asks her if she’s ever posted anything on the website and she’ll stutter and stumble before reluctantly showing him her F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Regency AU where Ross died of influenza and Sasappis will laugh before reading the whole thing in one sitting. She has a couple other one-shots up, mostly from pretty niche shows, so they don’t have big numbers or anything, but they’re cozy and she likes them.
Sass likes them too. He thinks her AU is pretty good and offers to beta.
(“If Isaac ever finds out that I haven’t been spending as much time on the biography because I’m working on this fic he might actually kill me,” Sam whispers.
Sass laughs and doesn’t deny it.)
Jay uses her AO3 account sometimes, to read Star Trek or Star Wars fanfic, which she doesn’t mind. It’s pretty easy to differentiate their bookmarks. (A couple times, she wrote him a little drabble as a gift, but she doesn’t think she knows the characters well enough to write something really good. Maybe one day.) But when she is scrolling through her saved works on a rainy day and realizes that over half the bookmarks are Sasappis’ she considers that they may have a problem.
“Do you want your own account?” Sam asks him once, when he’s telling her about a comment that he wants to leave on an Amphibia fic that he particularly enjoyed.
He blinks at her. “I’m dead, Sam.”
She shrugs. “Yeah, well I mean it’s not like they’re gonna check for a pulse. It would be pretty easy to set up another email for you and then I can just make you your own account, that way we can keep our stuff separate.”
It’s not like there’s an algorithm to mess up or anything, which she appreciates, but it feels kinda wrong to force Sass to share her account, when by all regards, he could have his own. And so she sets it up for him with relative ease - first the email, then the account; username pizass_1513. It’s slightly concerning how easy it is to make an AO3 account for a ghost.
(And when the email account asks for a last name, she looks at him and asks what he wants and he whispers ‘Arondekar’ and will not look at her and later she’ll tell Jay and they will hug each other and cry, just a little bit.)
She supposes that she should have expected it then, when he asks if she can dictate a fic that he’s been thinking about. Sam’s hesitant at first, especially after their last foray into collaboration, but after they agree that this is Sass’ project and that she’ll stay true to his vision she decides to try it out.
It goes surprisingly well.
His first fic is just a short one-shot, a missing scene from in between the first and second seasons of The Owl House, a conversation that he thinks should have happened.
“It’s not showing up,” he says, the second after she’s clicked the ‘Post’ button.
“Give it a second.” Sam reassures him. “There’s a lag.”
He hums and moves to stand at the back of the office, Sam switching tabs to work on the biography. She only gets a sentence down before Sasappis is leaning over her shoulder again. She sighs.
“Its been a minute. No one’s gonna have read it yet.” She tells him. “Trust me I get it - that’s why whenever I put my chapters out I tend to do it just before I sleep. That way I can wake up to kudos.”
“You couldn’t have told me that before I posted?” He sighs.
Sam grimaces. “Well, you could go take a nap. I don’t think it will have too big a impact on your sleep schedule.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he says with a roll of his eyes. They’ve had quite a few arguments about Sasappis sleep schedule from Hell before, the man saying sleep didn't matter because he was dead but he still phases through the door and goes to lie down.
When he wakes up he has eight kudos and 3 comments.
Omg, loved this!
fdjs kfhfjio ahh gklukaf <3
this was so in character, it feels like something that could realistically happen in the series. thanks for sharing!
Sass stares at the comments for a minute, smile widening with each one before laughing at the end, and spinning around happily. Sam watches him, looking like a kid at Christmas.
“Feels good doesn’t it?” She says.
He nods. And then laughs and shakes his head.
“It’s funny,” He says.
“Oh?”
“This is not the way that I thought I would get to tell my stories.” He says, considering. “But…it feels right. It feels like sharing something special, like community. Like keeping good stories alive. I dunno, but to me this feels like the way stories were supposed to be told.”
“I know what you mean.” Sam smiles. “I really do.”